A bunch of you have been asking me what software program I use to track and graph my SEO rankings ever since I published my SEO Case Study: Month 5 Results post.

In short, the software I am using is called Rank Tracker, and I highly recommend it. It costs $99.75 USD for a full professional license which may sound like a bit much to some people, but if you do any type of SEO work then you’re going to love this piece of software.

I purchased Rank Tracker a couple months ago because I was tired of wasting my time manually searching for all my keywords on each search engine, and because I couldn’t find a half-decent free online tool or program that could track and graph my rankings over time.

Below is a 23-minute screencast review I made last night so you can see exactly what it does

(Note: You may need to visit the post directly at TylerCruz.com if you’re reading this via e-mail or RSS in order to see it.)

I’m not sure if the trial version has a cut-off period, but you will certainly lack many of the vital features that the full version has, such as being able to actually save your rankings and track them over time.

I did check out Market Samurai but opted for Rank Tracker. Paul from PaulyMath.com loved MS as well (he bought it) but just a few days ago he told me that he is going to switch to Rank Tracker now as he is “fed up” with MS… might want to ask him why.

I think MS has a lot more keyword research features, but doesn’t keep a good historical record of past rankings like Rank Tracker does.

Yes Market Samurai has a Rank Tracking tool, but it is fairly basic. It is alright for randomly checking your rankings occasionally, but it is missing too many features. It wouldn’t be good for any serious marketing campaign where you really want to analyze rankings.

Tyler
Thanks for the great product review. In the video you mentioned sending the report to a cilent and I saw the Publish button in the interface. Have you actually tried to publish a report though? The reason I ask is that on the link-assistant website where it lists the product features, it says for the following features are only available on the enterprise version ($249), not the pro version ($99)
Create Printable Search Engine Rankings Reports
Send Rankings Reports Via Email To Clients
Save Reports To Your Computer
Export Rankings Data

So yeah, sorry about that, if you want to send it out to clients you need to get the Enterprise version.

That being said. It would only take 5-10 minutes to take screenshots of each page, stitch them together in Photoshop, and save as a PDF. Definitely not as simple and quick as having the Publish feature, but still doable (especially if you’re only doing it once a month).

thanks Tyler , i am using rank tracker free for checking my websites ranking but it not shows me always right but it gives me a little bit of idea about the ranking so i am doing manually. if i am paid for it and after it not show me correct ranking then why i am paying for it.

Rankings will always vary based on how you’re searching based on a number of factors such as toolbars, if you’re logged into Google, your personal social network of friends, what you’ve searched for before, etc.

Partly why I wanted to use a software program was to create a consistent and stable set of rank data to use a “control”.

I have owned both Rank Tracker and Market Samurai for a while now. At first I like Rank Tracker, but then I switched over to Market Samurai as I found it more visually pleasing.

But after using MS for about 4-6 months now I’m tired of all the bugs in it and I don’t really like how it sets up it’s projects. For example, if you want to check Google Canada vs Google US rankings you have to setup two different projects – one Canadian and one US, whereas Rank Tracker can track both in one project.

There are still parts of MS that I do like, like their keyword analysis parts, but purely for just tracking rankings each day I think Rank Tracker works better as it’s more stable, reliable and reports the data in a more “clean” format.

At the end of the day though, anyone serious about SEO should own both as they each have slightly different functions.

One thing with MS is that you pay once and that’s it. With Rank Tracker there is a monthly/quarterly or yearly fee for updates.

Any chance you could link to videos on another page instead of having them in the blog post showing on the index?
Ive just had to take you off my tabs I open automatically when I start firefox because the videos on the page are killing me.
I’m using prepaid mobile broadband which isn’t cheap in Ireland and don’t notice how much bandwidth is going on your videos loading up each time.

One more thing: take advantage of the free trial before you make any play on buying this. I have found that this is a great way to test things out, and decide if you should actually be spending the money. I have tons of products that I have purchased and never touched!

I started using Advanced Web Ranking recently. It sure saves time having a automated ranking software compared to checking the rankings manually. It’s also good to see a graph over a period of time to help with my motivation.

Very nice software, but I doubt how many people would afford it. Price can really be problem for beginner bloggers, But if you think long term then this investment can be very useful to get back benefits.